satellite view from PMNM
E komo mai; welcome! Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge is surrounded by a lei of foam in the middle of the North Pacific; it's a beautiful, special place.

Not only are there albatross on Midway, but many other interesting kinds of wildlife, both on the land and in the sea. Please enjoy exploring FOAM, an educational blog actively done while on Midway from May through August 2010. Posts are added from off-Midway, as information becomes available. If you're interested in a particular topic, please use the search box or the alphabetical list of "labels" along the left side of the blog page.

Sunday, July 11, 2010

Answers for "ACTIVITY: Laysan Ducks #2 -- Who's Who"

Challenge yourself to identify the bands of some Laysan Ducks in the "ACTIVITY: Laysan Ducks #2 -- Who's Who," in FOAM's menu bar above, and then check the answers in this data table.


When I looked up these bands in Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge's data base, I found out two interesting pieces of information--
  • The duck with the WF band is noted as having a "big puka left foot."  ("Puka" is the Hawaiian word for hole.  Perhaps WF got the puka in its foot pad when it stepped on a really sharp Nohu thorn!
  • RC, the duck I couldn't tell whether it was a male or female, is a male.
Some of these bands were really hard to see.  The hardest one for me to see was BRT.  At first I thought it was BKT, but I couldn't find that code in the data base.  Next time I saw that duck, I looked more closely and realized it must be brown, not black.  When I looked for BRT in the data base, it was there!  If you got at least half of these bands correct, you're on your way to being a wildlife scientist!

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